Books That will help me:
– Sonic Experience: A Guide to Everyday Sounds, Augoyard
– Practical Recording Techniques, Bartlett
– Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music, Warner
– Background Noise: Perspectives on Sound, LaBelle
– Spaces Speak, Are You Listening?

We received our assignment brief, to create an original sound composition with a reflective writing piece, due on the 25th of November. I will need to create four internal and four external audio recordings which i can use to create my composition.

TED Talk by Pauline Oliveros: Oliveros spoke about the difference between hearing and listening, a lifelong practice that involves connecting what you hear with your ears to the mind. I loved when she spoke about recording in The Cistern, which taught her the importance of listening, and how space can influence and shape the sound. After watching this TED Talk, I am very interested in listening the the art Oliveros and the musicians alongside her created in The Cictern (Deep Listening by Lapiz Lapuzi).

In the second part of this session, Milo handed out “oblique strategy” cards, which are designed to spark inspiration when at a creative block. My card read “make a blank valuable by putting it in an exquisite frame”, which immediately helped to form ideas of how I could go about creating my composition for my assignment brief. I am going to experiment with working with just drones, and what nature sounds I can use to make it “exquisite”, and hopefully this will help me to create a concept I can express.

I learnt that the basic number system that we use around Europe is called base 10, and is inherited from Arabic culture. The other number system we use in Europe is base 2, also knows as binary. It represents numbers only in 0s and 1s. For example:
– 6 would be represented as 0110
– 7 would be represented as 0111
-5 would be represented as 0101
These would all be known as 4bit information. 5bit information would look like:
– 10 represented as 01010
– 9 represented as 01001.
A CPU (Central Processing Unit) works in binary, so this is key information to build an actual understanding of bit depth, and sample rate, which affect the quality of recordings and production.

The hardware environment is anything physical, external that we use to create sounds and music. This can include the apple “ecosystem”, interfaces, monitors, etc.
The software environment is anything we can use to create inside of the system, which is a large range of different tools for different purpose. Being introduced to the wide range of software available at UAL, I am now aware that music can be created through code (Arduino, Super Collider, Wave Agent), and that I do not need to stick to the linear constraints of Logic when using new DAWs (Ableton Live, Pro-Tools).

My main takeaway from this session was my interest in the cistern. When Pauline Oliveros spoke about its ability to shape the composition she created, it made me think; how can I create or find a space with similar abilities to the cistern? For a long while now I’ve had a creative block, but perhaps in an environment where the sound is being nurtured for me, it will be easier to start creating again. When researching into cisterns, it came as a surprise to me that their intended use is to store and catch water. With this in mind, I am going to look for settings that have an intended purpose of something that helps us as humans (like with the cistern), and see how being and recording in that environment can help me to create again.